Traditional gaming machines were slot-type machines which utilized spinning mechanical reels. Those reels had slot symbols printed on them and the symbols were thus of a fixed size.
Later, electronic gaming machines were developed and these gaming machines have become the mainstay of casinos. These machines utilize one or more electronic video displays to display images of slot symbols, playing cards and the like. These machines can be programmed to display a variety of information in a variety of layouts.
Relative to a video poker game, regular video poker players regularly achieve play rates of approximately 600 hands per hour. Due to the physical location of player seating and input controls (e.g., buttons on a slot machine button deck), the player's facial proximity to the video display is approximately 15-24 inches.
The trend in gaming is towards gaming machines having larger video displays. For example, a 22-inch diagonal video display is fairly common today. From the manufacturer and operator perspective, it is desirable to have the same machine be able to present multiple games and game types (e.g., video slots, video poker, keno, etc. on the same gaming device).
Video poker players often use peripheral vision to determine card values, including not only the card rank (e.g., 2, 5, Q, A, etc.) but also color and suit (e.g., red heart, black club, etc.). Displaying normal full size cards on such a large video display, given the close viewing position of the player, leads to a field of view (for the cards) which is too wide for the player to always perceive all of the displayed cards. In that event, a player may be forced to visually scan the cards from one side to the other rather than being able to perceive all of the cards at the same time. This is tiring to the player and slows down the game play.
There are several problems associated with addressing this problem. First, not all players sit the same distance from the video display of the gaming machine. Second, not all players have the same level of peripheral vision. Third, not all players have the same level of eyesight generally. For example, one option for the game designer is to reduce the size of all of the information which is displayed. However, some players may then find that the size of various information is so small that it is no longer readable.